One of the most important and common functions of modern personal computers is providing access to and presenting Internet content. Internet content is typically provided and presented to users by means of an internet browser, such as SAFARI® made by APPLE® Inc., of Cupertino, Calif. or FIREFOX® made by MOZILLA® Corp., of Mountain View, Calif. or INTERNET EXPLORER® made by MICROSOFT® Corp., of Redmond, Wash.
The increasingly commonplace use of internet browsers and the concomitant growth in quality, quantity, and linkage of Internet content has led to new expectations regarding the ease of navigating the wealth of information found on the internet. With the advent of more sophisticated websites, many of which provide extensive useful content, updated daily or more often, users of internet browsers have begun accessing internet content in new ways. Whereas users once accessed single websites as destinations, perhaps following one or two of the hypertext links therein, users are now more likely to access particular websites as entry points.
For example, news organizations have built elaborate websites that rival print media in currency and usability. Users may access such a site and find many articles worth reading, each of which is contained in a separate webpage. Furthermore, increasingly savvy authors pepper these articles with hyper-text links to related articles, original sources, or other content of interest, each of which is contained in a separate webpage.
Another developing internet use model involves what are known in the art as “aggregators.” Aggregators are websites that perform the function of allowing users to customize what content should be accessible and linked to from the user's customized view of the website. Aggregators are typically used to provide a single point of access to a customized plurality of content-providing web pages to which new content is added regularly, such as web-logs (blogs) and news sites.
The result of these shifting use patterns is that users are now more likely to access many web pages in parallel, rather than sequentially. As a result, the first model of presenting web content, in which new pages were always opened in new graphical user interface (GUI), windows became inadequate. Having more than one or two web browser windows open is distracting and difficult to manage. The traditional means of switching between GUI windows often identified different windows with only a title, containing the name of the application, which does not provide enough information to the user looking for a window containing a particular web page. Even if more information is included in the title, the information is largely limited to textual information, which can be inadequate or cumbersome to use. Within the multiple-window model, a user cannot easily find a particular web page when he or she has many pages open concurrently.
Thus, an improved model for presenting multiple pages of web content became popular. This model, known in the art as “tabbed browsing,” is so named because of the multiple tabs in which a user is provided with content. This prior art presentation of multiple pages of internet content is illustrated in FIG. 1. User display 100 is a typical view of the tabbed browsing model. In this model, multiple web pages are all viewable within a single GUI window, user display 100. The content of the pages is viewable one page at a time, and the view can be switched from one page to another via tabs. Thus, in the figure, the content, 105, of PAGE 3 is being viewed. PAGE 1, PAGE 2, and PAGE 4 are presented in tabs, 101, 102, and 104, respectively. A user can view the content of PAGE 1, for example, by selecting its tab, 101, with the cursor, 110.
Unfortunately, tabbed browsing continues to present drawbacks similar to those of the model upon which it sought to improve. Chiefly, a user still cannot easily find a particular web page when he or she has many pages open concurrently. In FIG. 1, only 4 pages are open, and so the interface is manageable. However, once the number of open pages is doubled, or tripled, as is not uncommon for modern internet users, tabbed browsing becomes just as cumbersome as its predecessor model. As there is limited room for tabs, an interface such as the one illustrated in FIG. 1 presents a problem when more web pages are accessed than there is room to display tabs. One solution is to shrink the width of the tabs, which results in their titles being unreadable and leaving the user with no way to identify which tab corresponds to a particular web page for which he or she is searching. An alternative is to allow the tabs to extend off the screen, and provide some means to scroll through them. However, scrolling is not an ideal method of searching for a particular textual title. Indeed, tabbed browsing continues to present a model in which a user must identify a web page based solely on the title of that webpage, when titles often do not provide adequate distinctions between open pages.